Another year has passed and we’ll soon be saying the end to 2014 and hello to 2015 – but you’ll have to do it without our development team, well, at least until we re-open on January 5th 2015. Our Manchester office (the development team) will be shut from 23rd December 2014 until 5th January 2015. Development team members will still be checking their respective and common email inbox’s – but only on a semi-regular basis, hosting support will continue to be provided 24/7 via theclientarea.info. The team here at Sonassi wants to thank all our customers for making our 2014 so brilliant – and we look forward to continuing to be the best Magento provider in the UK during the years to come. Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

A bit of background Sonassi is a Magento hosting provider, that specialises wholly in high performance Magento hosting using the highly regarded MageStack Operating System. We have Magento developers and Magento consultants on staff to support hosting customers; we eat, sleep and breath Magento. Server location does matter … or does it? I fear I may have got carried away with this email #sales #sarcasm pic.twitter.com/Wmju11qLIZ — Ben Lessani @sonassi (@sonassi) December 4, 2014 A question that we are (extremely) often asked is whether we have servers installed in [country X]. More often than not, the question is posed from US merchants, looking to use our hosting services (as of writing this article, the majority of our infrastructure is in the UK). So I find myself in a situation where I’ve got two challenges to overcome, To educate the customer on the technical relevance (and irrelevance) of location To change … Continue reading →

Mage-Perftest is a simple Linux command line tool to test the performance of your Magento store, it can perform a number of clever operations which makes it far more suitable than `siege` or `ab`. Its not a replacement for fully fledged simulation tools (like jMeter), but it is simple to set up and run. **You can use it for a number of different things,** PHP TTFB (time to first byte) performance testing Whole page (including static content & assets) performance testing Load/stress testing Concurrency testing Repeat testing Site cache priming/crawling **It also has the ability to,** Use sessions during crawling Supports keepalives Bypass Varnish cash (to test actual server performance) Read and parse Magento sitemaps (eg. `http://www.example.com` format) Use fixed and random seeds when parsing sitemaps 1. for either completely random tests, or fixed random tests Simulate traffic over a defined period of time (eg. 1000 unique visitors in a … Continue reading →